Living on borrowing / Daily crono / Becoming a happy camper / Democracy über alles

Living on borrowing

Thomas L. Friedman has a great sentence in his column in today's New York Times.

When a country lives on borrowed time, borrowed money and borrowed energy, it is just begging the markets to discipline it in their own way at their own time.

I have just one thing to add: this country also lives on borrowed talent. It saw it today myself. I was sitting in the Stata Center reading a book, when a class ended and undergraduates started to exit the classroom right next to me. At least 80% of them looked Asian. I have been reading on the lack of talent in USA, but I have never seen it first hand. Now, if and when the dollars crashes, life in USA gets harder due to some paranoid security regulation, or otherwise the Asian countries get their act together, the borrowed talent may exit just as easily as the borrowed money. This would spell disaster for this great country.

I also realized, that I like to look at crowds of people. It is for me as relaxing as looking at fire/sea/desert is for some other people. I like to be in a large group, watching people, trying to figure out what their life is like, etc, or just enjoy the movement.

Daily crono

The day was really good. In the morning, at 8 am, we had the RFID class. We were talking about the required SW-system (RFID causes another level of complexity to supply chain SW-systems, while at the same time removing lots of manual labor. It is another example of products/services getting virtual, which is one of the fundamental phenomena in all industries and technologies). There will also be some security issues (actually, privacy) , too. After the class, I spent a few hours reading Christensen's "Innovator's dilemma", which is interesting and easy to read. At 14.30 we had the disruptive technology class. One researcher presented his new dynamic models of the development of industries. ( Henry Weil) Pretty interesting results: it takes a technology about 10 years to get any significant market share after the technology has been conceived. And the R&D spending peaks at 20 years. This seems to be true, and also supports my intuition that 3G is going to die off. Then, from 4.30 pm to 8pm, I was first in the product development class, and after that working with the group. I was really pleased to notice, that the group is getting together, and we are able to do real work. Great, and it did not take even much time. Today, about 13 hours of fun. I could still have 1.5 hours more, but I am not so sure whether I can without becoming too hilarious, i.e. freaking out. Well, I may as well read something before going to bed at 12pm.

Becoming a happy camper

Professor Roemer said to me today: " You really do destroy all stereotypes". It is the most flattering thing I have heard for a long time.

I must confess, that I have not been fulfilling my duty as a student. I have not been stirring up trouble, and I think Tom Allen may be a bit disappointed at me. I may have to become more active on this too rather soon. If I am really clever, I will outsource this to someone else. Beware, my dear classmates, you will not even notice when you become part of my supply chain of trouble!

Democracy über alles

Link of the day: Currency Transaction Tax (CTT) Wiki, another web-site of NIGD, or Network Institute for Global Democratization , which I am member of, not that active though. Earlier, the dream of have global democracy was a pipe-dream, but today, as we have Mr. Bush on our side, I think democracy will reign supreme soon enough. It may, of course, be of rather imperfect type, or even not that democratic after all.

Alun perin julkaistu kuukausikoosteessa "Blogs February 2005".