economics

An interesting talk during a TED conference may be relevant to my previous story about the best states to live in which I posted on Saturday. In this talk, Daniel Kahneman points out that our happiness is often judged in very different ways depending on our memory of how happy or miserable we were with something, some place, some event, or some person rather than the reality of what we experienced.

An article titled "The New Population Bomb: The Four Megatrends That Will Change the World" by Jack A. Goldstone in the magazine, Foreign Affairs, is primarily about how different factors will impact one megatrend: world population; or perhaps its about how the megatrend of population will affect other world concerns. Either way, this is an interesting article with a positive, albeit politically unpopular, outlook on how to manage changes in the coming decades. So how can Western businesses, non-profit organizations, and government institutions adjust their strategies to cope with these impending changes and their impacts?

I completed reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in April of this year, and it was a thoroughly invigorating book.  During the final evening of reading this page-turner of a book, I finally came to the author's primary assertion that reality is far more Mandelbrotian than Guassian in nature.  In other words, we live in a world of chaos and the unexpected rather than a world of bell curves of normality...

Microsoft apparently doesn't like to listen and then dialog with their most sophisticated users when it comes to security issues, to name just one way they are failing as a business in the Information Age. A security vulnerability in SQL Server, Microsoft's premier database management application which competes with products like Oracle, MySQL, and others was discovered and reported in the linked article.  In a nutshell, this security vulnerability allows a user with administrative priveledges to SQL Server to access other user's passwords, but not without some "hacking" to do so.  In any case, Microsoft has refused to fix the problem because they don't care about their users.

A story on the Wall Street Journal today primarily talks about G-20 meeting highlights, but I found the last few paragraphs even more enlightening:

"The Obamas presented the queen with an iPod loaded with footage of her last visit to the U.S. and gave her a rare song book autographed by American composer Richard Rodgers. That continued a multimedia theme started this winter when the president presented Mr. Brown with a set of DVDs, a gift deemed insufficient by the British press. The queen gave the Obamas a framed photograph of herself and the Duke of Edinburgh."