The Chinese symbol for Danger is composed of crisis plus opportunity.
Westerners love this beautiful insight.
Yet when you ask a Chinese person if they know it, they all know how
to write danger, and when asked, they all know what each of the
components mean, but most have never stopped to think of the wisdom
and inherent lesson contained therein.
Some times we are too close to things to notice.
Sent from my iPhone – pardon typos
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Here is a project that seems quite powerful:
…a mesmerizing dialogue between teh children of the perpetrators of the Holocaust and the children of the surivors. Both live out the Holocaust daily, unable to move forward. Both finally face the past and are empowered to move on.
The trailer video contained here is worth watching.
I’ve always felt the weight on my shoulders from my Dad’s survival of the Dachau concentration camp. I cannot escape those shadows. It had never crossed my mind that the children of the perpetrators must have similarly been marked and shaped by that experience. Very poignant, and the trailer seems to confront the issue with depth and introspection. It includes the story of a marriage between the son of a survivor and the descendant of a major Nazi criminal.
My friend Andrew McLaughlin had pointed me to this very cool video and this post a while back – re Technology and the White House transition – and I only now got to see it. The way the new techies in the White House are thinking about government and governance is really innovative – they are literally finding ways to increase transparency, efficiency and value-creation by combining the power of government with technology and entrepreneurial thinking. Take a look at the idea in minute 1:55:
Nice idea for a social enterprise to build a guerrilla marketing campaign on:
I don’t agree with everythign Aluf Benn writes, and I feel Israelis overall are unusually suspicious of President Obama, but I believe Benn hit the nail on the head with his article in the New York Times advising Obama to speak to the Israeli people directly. I voted for Obama believing he would push for concrete progress towards a two-state-solution, and I don’t believe pressing Israel to be realistic is bad but good and needed. But Obama’s failure to speak directly to Israelis is a huge missed opportunity and is harming chances for peace.
Shaikh Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, Crown Prince of Bahrain, wrote a refreshing column in the Washington Post, telling Israelis and Arabs some truths they need to hear about the imperative of moving towards conflict resolution. Unfortunately earnest non-partisan nuanced talk doesn’t get as much coverage as biased one-sided positions. But it is worth reading.
Interesting article on an effort to bridge the frontier between the real and virtual worlds of gaming and entertainment, an area that interests me a lot.
I have been hearing many cliches about how the New York City Real Estate market at the end of the day will not adjust as much as the rest of the real estate market because of scarcity. But the economist in me doesn’t buy it. Yes, as supply is somewhat limited, real estate in NYC should reasonably appreciate more solidly than in the expanses of San Antonio, TX, where land is plenty. But the crazy run-up in prices over the last decade+ cannot be reconciled solely by scarcity, and as bubbles burst in all other asset categories, so to they will (and have started to) in Manhattan real estate.
It is surprising that so few resources are available online to track historical trends in real estate – per square foot and/or per median and average home prices, for NYC and otherwise.
It almost seems as if real estate brokers want to focus prospects purely on 5-year timelines, and that is all they publish and share.
So here are the few sites I found useful, in case others find them handy: